Paul Rigby

Tim, If you want to live in a democracy, you need reliable information: spook control of the press is the enemy of reliable, unmanipulated information. But are they? Is it really so self-evident that covert intelligence gathering produces better decision making than contested open sources? Iraq? The Falklands War? If MI6 was measured by results, it would no longer exist; and a number of its most senior figures would be in prison or unemployed. Big and, frankly, unjustified assumption: He - or she - could equally have played a role in the planting of a bomb, or the assassination of a politician adjudged disposable. It would be interesting to see a decent study, for example, of why Nkrumah expelled a bunch of British correspondents in the wake of an assassination attempt against him in 1962. Were they merely gathering intel, or active members of the assassination plot?

Was C.P. Scott, the Guardian’s legendary editor, quite the paragon of virtue portrayed in John Simkin’s online biography? To the contrary, I would suggest, Scott was responsible for at least the continuance, and quite possibly the establishment, of a Guardian tradition that betrayed any good he might have done in the rest of his life and work; and continues to this day. The tradition to which I refer is directly related to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – media collusion with the intelligence services. The practice of combining espionage with journalism is as old as newspapers. In May 1923, it was the subject of a withering editorial in a major British daily. The occasion was the cheery confession of Marguerite Harrison, a recently released American spook, upon arrival in Riga from imprisonment by the Cheka: The British newspaper responsible for this grotesque piece of cant? Yes, the good old Manchester Guardian. To appreciate the extent of the editorialist’s hypocrisy, we must jump forward to 1987, and the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, as commemorated in the pages of…The Guardian. In a piece entitled, “The MG and 1917,” the paper’s Richard Gott (2) examined “the way the Manchester Guardian dealt with the upheavals of a dramatic period” (3): The Guardian lied to its readers about Soskice’s true role in the Winter Palace with Kerensky. As Gott noted the following day, as he detailed Soskice’s flight from Russia and major account of the fall of Kerensky: Price Philips’ enthusiastic championship of the Bolshevik revolution inevitably drew the attention of both the British censor, and, upon his return to Britain, “the head of CID at Scotland Yard, who kept C.P. Scott…informed of his activities” (6). As Gott went on to note, Philips Price “came from an old Liberal Manchester family, and indeed his great grandfather had been one of the Manchester cotton merchants who had helped set up the Manchester Guardian in the first place” – a fact which did not prevent Scott from dispensing with his services (7). The man who replaced Price Philips, Arthur Ransome, also worked for MI6 (8). So much for the claim, advanced in David Ayerst’s hagiographic work on Scott and the paper, that "from Peterloo to Suez the Scott family throughout…endeavoured to speak plainly and truthfully” (9). This collusion between Guardian and spook endured long after Scott. The Cold War saw only one change of note, and that was for the worse. In addition to the usual welter of British Intelligence officers and assets - by the mid-1950s, the paper was little more than a front for the infamous Information Research Department (10) - the Guardian increasingly acted as the CIA's primary vehicle for channelling harmlessly the Non-Communist Left in Britain. The Agency's involvement was characteristically brazen. As with Encounter, it took the form of subsidy by subscription (11). Thus by August 1952, no less than nine percent of the paper's circulation of 127,000 made its way, ostensibly at least, to the US (12). The appeal to American readers - all 12,000-plus of them - was obvious: the paper still carried adverts on its front-page, and continued to be published in Manchester, the very heart of state power in highly decentralised fifties Britain. By the late 1960s, The Guardian was the recycler of much material from a series of CIA fronts, most obviously the news services of Kern House Enterprises Inc., a typical Delaware-registered scam (13). Any wonder, then, that the paper should have proved such a stalwart supporter of the Warren Report? (14). The Guardian moved to London from Manchester in 1961. Commenting on the move, Arthur Christiansen, the legendary editor of the Daily Express, and Beaverbrook’s favourite editor-harlot, expressed the view that the paper was now set to become a "third force" - next to the Times and the Daily Telegraph - in British journalism (15). Whether inadvertent or mischievous, the phrase was inspired: By 1961, the phrase was routinely used in America to denote the CIA (16). Amusingly, the Guardian's pride in its "exceptionalism" - that the paper is uniquely independent and virtuous (by virtue of its ownership by a Trust) - replicates precisely a core belief of the American right, which ordinarily sees a rather more divine source for the blessing (17). And who exactly financed that move from Manchester to London? John Simkin, in compiling his profile of C.P. Scott, might usefully have asked precisely that question with regard to Scott’s acquisition of the Guardian in 1904. I don’t know the answer, but I’d be willing to bet a tidy sum that the money men were not a million miles away from Rhodes’ heirs in the Round Table. To be continued…

Your cut of the kickback?

Edward T. Folliard, "Robert Kennedy Insults Texas, GOP charges," Washington Post, (Saturday), 17 February 1962, p.A4: In the course of visit to Indonesia, RFK called the US-Mexican ear of 1846-48 "unjustified". "It was not a very bright spot in our history - not one to be very proud of." In joining with a youthful Lincoln's assessment, RFK joined with Lincoln's fate.

British affection for RFK was unusual in that it emanated from both the general public, and our hereditary foreign policy establishment (fpe). Perhaps the clearest expression of the latter's enthusiasm is to be found, appropriately enough, in what used to be the house organ of the British establishment: My strong impression is that MI6 did not share the enthusiasm of the rest of the British fpe; and that Foot, if I have his career right, was no stranger to that fine body of disinterested professionals.

Contrary to the impression left by Lifton in Best Evidence, CBS claimed to have rather more than just the transcript. Below, a clipping I printed from Denis Morissette’s website in March 2003. Part of the text, unfortunately, was cut off by the right margin. Since then, the link to this particular clip seems to have gone down, but the rest of the clippings appear to be available still, & are well worth a look: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senat...Newspapers.html I wonder if CBS still has the soundless recording it claimed to have in 1967? I suspect a native enquirer would fair better than a perfidious Brit, so if any American reader has a spare half hour or so, fancy emailing or writing CBS to find out? PS: Denis, if you read this, please restore the clipping in full.

Nat, no, absolutely not. As Richard Cummings’ aforementioned estimable biog, The Pied Piper: Allard Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (NY: Grove Press Inc., 1985) - in particular, the opening chapter of the work’s final section, VII, “On His Own,” pages 454-469 - leaves no doubt. Lowenstein was a dutiful CIA footsoldier throughout the period in question. The Agency had other purposes in mind, none of them remotely edifying, when it had Lowenstein go public about his "doubts." I agree that Sweeney gives every indication of being a "handled nut." The purpose of his assassination? Like John Lennon's, essentially symbolic, as Lowenstein was now considered expendable. The 60s terminated in hail of bullets. Here comes Ronnie! Paul

Ah, yes, good old Gene McCarthy and his children’s crusade. So pure it hurts: The full piece from Private Eye: In early April, when McCarthy’s campaign seemed to falter for lack of funds, the first West Coast industrialist to come forward was Dan Kimball. Kimball is chairman of Aerojet – General Corp. whose representative in Washington is Admiral Rayburn, ex-CIA Chief. The problem recently for the McCarthy cooperatives has been Kennedy’s entrance into the race, also, apparently, as a peace candidate. Lowenstein has left the McCarthy camp and is now floating. But, in the past two weeks, two former officials of the CIA have joined the McCarthy campaign to help Gans and Brown.

A quick and straightforward comparison of the respective coverage of The Grauniad and Novosti. One of the two pieces spends more or less its entire length misleading us. The other one introduces us to the George Soros of Tbilisi – and thus doesn’t. http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331209788-103681,00.html http://en.rian.ru/world/20071109/87377366.html

Elsewhere, too. There is, also, an answer staring us in the face as to the discrepancy between Clark’s recollection of when the press conference began, and Perry’s. First, to recap the difference: Manchester provides the explanation: Perry began the press conference unaccompanied by Clark. Here’s the relevant extract: Useful, at this stage, to reacquaint ourselves with the transcript 1327C’s version of how the press conference began: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/press.htm Nor would it appear to be true, when one examines the above version of the press conference, that Perry bore a markedly greater burden of the questioning than Clark. Paul

The obvious question: How did the Associated Press produce a report on the Perry-Clark press conference at “just after two o’clock” (CST) when said press conference didn’t begin until a) 3:16 pm (transcript 1327C); or, at earliest, at 2:18 pm (photographic section of Lifton’s Best Evidence*)? An obvious solution suggests itself: The press conference began before 2 pm (CST), and was still going on – perhaps winding up - at 2:18 pm when the photo reproduced in Best Evidence was taken. So much for the hypothesis. Any evidence to support it? So far, only one piece that I can find. In the second section, p. 3, of the evening edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram of Saturday, 23 November, a similar or identical photograph of Perry and Clark to that found in Best Evidence is reproduced. The caption beneath it runs as follows: “DOCTORS DESCRIBE DEATH: Drs. Kemp Clark, left, and Malcolm Perry, right, told newsmen at 1:45 pm Friday of what they and others at Parkland Hospital in Dallas did to try to save President Kennedy’s life. Man at center is White House aide.”

Several times. I find it more richly rewarding by the visit. But to business. In your classic disinformationist thread, There Was No Bullet Wound in John F. Kennedy's Throat, Heresy at High-Noon-Thirty: Ghosthunters' Bane, we witness a sustained attempt to shift suspicion from the Secret Service to the Parkland medical staff: Such good men, those SS types. “Eliminated.” Yes, their charge surely was. A long time before he reached Parkland. Among the real perps, those terribly suspicious Parklanders, we find that very bad man Dr. Perry, who you do not accuse, perish the thought, of anything – you merely lay out “relevant incontrovertible facts about the statements and actions” about him “among others”(Oct 30 2007, 09:25 PM Post #95) and generously permit us reach our own conclusions - even as you insist in the same thread that he: On the credit side, however, we find the man you are not accusing of anything is ruled out of the crime that no one saw and for which no evidence whatever exists: “Perry is very unlikely for having created the piercing wound and the evidence strongly suggests that he can be eliminated as having created the wound” (Oct 30 2007, 09:25 PM Post #95).” Nice. That’s a relief. But, no, you can’t quite absolve him entirely here, either. It’s back to the original baseless charge: “At the same time there is no question whatsoever that he is the one who destroyed all evidenciary [sic] value of the wound and thereby precluded any chance of anyone ever determining how it had been created (Ibid.).” We now turn to this thread. Here, a contributor calling himself Ashton Gray, a man who is neither inconsistent nor a dissembler, and does not attempt to hijack the thread – see post #3: “My rather comprehensive response to at least the throat-shot aspect of this is not a response, per se, but an article that I have just posted in a veritable miracle of synchronicity, There Was No Bullet Wound in John F. Kennedy's Throat” (Oct 21 2007, 06:09 PM) - but instead, much more constructively, introduces a paragon of evidentiary virtue called…er, Dr Perry, the man who would stoop, according to the original Ashton Gary, to destroying evidence of a throat entrance wound, but would never, Heaven forefend, dream of lying under oath: “What else was it again that Perry said under oath—which Rigby has carefully omitted from his entire screeching screed? ‘I did not see any other wounds.’” Can’t think why I ever a) thought Perry shifted with the establishment wind (and who can blame him); or doubted the logic and veracity of Ashton Gray. Can you?

Dreadful diction: One hijacks planes or treasure, not sinking ships or dreck. And so wildly, characteristically, over-the-top. I simply exposed your claim for the obvious nonsense it was, and is. What a pity you don’t understand the meaning of the verb “to decimate” – then again, only one in ten do. Or the meaning of hypocrisy. Now this is a real curiosity, this obsession with expectoration – in an education forum, too. A primitive expression of the will to dominate and/or an expression of contempt, I suppose. It just goes to show, even here, spit happens. (Oscar Wilde: “In America, life is one long expectoration.” So it would appear.) It’s called debate. Get used to it. You’re not in Congress. Or an echo chamber. And we all know what an Ashton promise is worth… Don’t forget your catapult, a decent dictionary, and, most pressingly of all, an adult. You’ll need all three. Surgical or velvet? You don’t say. *”Spew,” again. All very…oral. Is there a shrink in the house?

Bernice, Thanks for reminding me of Kent’s very interesting piece. He couldn’t be more right: Baffling it unquestionably appears to be. But there is a way out of the Wild Wood. At the end of his thought-provoking essay, Kent refers to David Lifton. I was from the first, and remain to this day, a great admirer of Best Evidence, even though I have never been convinced by the validity the book’s conceptual denouement, the Clandestine Intermission Hypothesis (CIH). Why the rejection? Because the CIH rests upon the mistaken belief that the Bethesda autopsy duo, Humes and Boswell, were as much the innocent dupes of external forces as their Parkland medical compatriots: Wound patterns 1 & 2, representing those observed at Parkland and Bethesda respectively, are not the geographically discrete entities he believes them to be. Pattern 1 – the real pattern 1, not the doctored version Lifton erroneously embraces, a mistake due in no small measure to his uncritical embrace of the fraudulent transcript that is the subject of this thread – is demonstrably present at Bethesda, too. And what we find is Humes and Boswell working on the classic counter-pattern, an aborted precursor to the final agreed lie. To explain what I’m getting at, I can think of no better place to begin than Sylvia Meagher’s 1967 classic, Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities & The Report (NY, Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), pp.161-2: Meagher was unquestionably alive to the possibility of body alteration – in a tantalising footnote, she refers readers to a December 1964 special issue of Ramparts detailing “the falsification of autopsy findings in the case of James Chaney”* - but insufficiently certain of the actual wounds and their locations to pursue the issue in the main body of her text. Had she been, I suspect the outcome would have been very interesting, for this was one very acute mind at work. Had Meagher fixed upon the correct three wounds – a small, left temple entrance, with corresponding large, right-rear head exit; and a small entrance wound in the throat – she would assuredly have grasped the correct chronology of the left temple wound notations made by Humes and Boswell. The order is deliberate. Humes’ “0.4 cm” represents the unaltered left temple entrance wound observed at Parkland. The second measurement offered, by Boswell, represents the early stage of that entrance wound’s subsequent expansion en route to becoming an exit wound. Hence the arrow described by Meagher. In summary, then, at the time during the evening of 22 November when Boswell made that notation, there was work in progress to reverse the wound pairing. This was a logical response: The appointed patsy, after all, was alleged to have been firing from the right-rear of Kennedy.

Silly claim: Left temple entry: 1) Elm St eyewitness: Norman Similas: “I could see a hole in the President's left temple...,” Jack Bell, “10 Feet from the President,” NYT, 23 November 1963, p.5, citing Toronto Star. 3) Parkland non-medical staff: Father Oscar Huber: “terrible wound” over Kennedy's left eye [AP despatch, Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 24 November 1963] 5) JFK shot in the face/front of the head/forehead: a) Alan Smith: “The car was ten feet from me when a bullet hit the President in the forehead…the car went about five feet and stopped,” Jack Bell, “Eyewitnesses describe scene of assassination: Sounds of shooting brought car to a halt,” NYT, 23 November 1963, p.5. James Chaney: “When the second shot came, I looked back in time to see the President struck in the face,” Anthony Summers’ The Kennedy Conspiracy (London: Sphere, 1992), p.23, citing, on p.543, an “unidentified film interview in police station and taped interview for KLIF, Dallas, on record ‘The Fateful Hours,’ Capitol Records.” See also: 22 November 1963, WFAA-TV, video packet, & Houston Chronicle, 24 November 1963. c) Dr. Perry: “When asked to specify the nature of the wound, Dr. Perry said that the entrance wound was in the front of the head,” Post-Dispatch News Services, “Priest Who Gave Last Rites ‘Didn’t See Any Sign of Life,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 24 November 1963, p.23A; also Associated Press despatch, shortly after 2 pm, quoted by WOR Radio, New York, at 2:43 pm, CST (Fred Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder from Within, p.154, n.58): ‘Dr. Perry said the entrance wound—which is the medical description—the entrance wound was in the front of the head’” Very wise. Paul

Oh, I don't know: And you forgot to mention the "moron" had other, equally heretical, form: Paul

David Lifton's Best Evidence: Disguise & Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (NY: Signet, Nov 1992), p.325: (46) Marshal Houts. Where Death Delights (NY: Coward McCann, 1967), p.57. (47) Warren Commission Report, edition unspecified, p.88.* (48) Bethesda Autopsy Report, p.4. (49) Marshal Houts. Where Death Delights (NY: Coward McCann, 1967), p.57. *In the edition of this fabulous work of fiction I own: And Ashton Gray, of course, in this & other threads, 2007.

An outrage - it's the pub. All of which explains, why, three years after the event, and with the AP despatch in question nowhere to be seen in the work of the first generation critics (Lane, Weisberg, et al), Manchester returned to it in the manner he did. Or perhaps not. Our old friend Dulles had a nifty little quote for precisely this eventuality, one cannily picked up on by David Lifton in Best Evidence, p.809: "little slips or oversights which [can] give the game away" (The Craft of Intelligence. Harper & Row, 1963). Quite. Was it? Paul

You could not be more precisely on target. Pun intended. Such is the sine qua non for the perpetuation of needless uncertainty, debate, and internecine conflict -- the guarantors of security for the killers. Argue though we might about frontal shots, we remain in profound agreement on the origins and purposes of the by-design cognitive dissonance that befuddles the vast majority of well-meaning researchers. Charles The Old Music Master by Hoagy Carmichael?

Nope, nothing of the sort. And had your remote viewing been up to scratch, you’d have known as much from the scrawls in my notebook. Still, and for the record, I agree with you (and many others) that Burkley was indeed a witting conspirator. That’s twice from the front, please… So let me see if I have your logic right: Perry, a CIA plant among the Parkland doctors, goes before the afternoon press conference primed with a rank piece of CIA disinformation - to the effect that Kennedy had an entrance wound in the front of the head – delivers said piece of rank disinfo, only for the CIA to suppress its own corker of a piece of disinformation from that day forth? Er, why? Surely it was in the interest of the CIA to disseminate newsreel and tape recordings of that press conference as widely and frequently as possible? Instead, nada, for, what, 44 years? You said it. But wait, I did have it right: Hyperbolic tosh. Perry did no such thing. He pragmatically utilised a small, existing wound in the throat – instead of puncturing an unnecessary duplicate – after slightly extending, by horizontal slits, the existing wound to facilitate the entrance of a tube. Here’s Humes, courtesy of Weisberg (Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report, p.320, citing 2H371) on Perry’s wholesale destruction of “all evidence of the wound that was in Kennedy’s throat”: You conclude, with characteristic restraint: You have it the entirely the wrong way round, diametrically speaking, naturally. *I think it was Plutarch who it put it best: “Our minds are confused by the close proximity of opposites.”

A very useful concept, “an unresolvable dichotomy of diametrically opposing ‘scenarios,’”* but not, alas, in this instance: a true diametric opposition would have Burkley informing Kilduff that the entrance wound was in the back of the head ie at the other end of the diameter, as opposed to Perry’s insistence – suppressed by 1327C – that there was an entrance wound in the front of the head. It is “straight text book,” agreed, but from a very different, and more subtle, manual: You don’t begin by butchering the truth, you shave it. This is precisely what Burkley did when he fed Kilduff that guff about an entrance wound in the right temple. The consensus among the Parkland doctors on the afternoon of 22 November was that there was a matching pair of head wounds – a small entry in the left temple, and a correspondingly large exit at the right rear. “Thoroughly”? No, you haven’t. With regard to Perry, you’ve simply kept asserting he was a conspirator. Repeated assertion is just that, assertion. What you rather grandly call my “major premise” couldn’t be more obvious, and is contained in the thread’s opening piece: contemporaneous new reports v. a manuscript which surfaced publicly only in 1976. Your incomprehension is thus feigned, and born of an ulterior motive. To illustrate the perversity of your interpretation, let’s revisit that alleged failure of mine to venture my, yes, “major premise”: Very opaque, I must say. End of part 1.

A paired example, a la Chomsky, but minus the CIA-serving spin, has long suggested itself. There were of course two press conferences at Parkland in the two hours following the confirmation of Kennedy’s death shortly after 1300hrs, CST. (The time of 1300hrs was a convenient rounding back.) The first, that featuring Malcolm Kilduff, acting presidential press spokesman, began at just after 1330hrs. Here’s what Kilduff said according to Manchester's Death of a President: Version 1: Version 2: Demonstrably, then, the same technique - of divide, censor, dismiss, and subsequently resurrect without attribution, as applied to Perry and the “entrance wound at the front of the head” - is utilised by Manchester on Kilduff’s brief official announcement of Kennedy’s death. For what Kilduff actually said included the following: As Lifton notes in the above book, NBC broadcast a UPI despatch citing Burkley on the right temple entrance on the afternoon of 22 November (Ibid.). This seems clear enough: Both Burkley (via Kilduff) and Perry, in the early afternoon of 22 November, uttered heresy to the pre-planned scenario of a lone gunman firing from high to the right rear. Their treatment, and that of their respective testimonies, therefore, first at the hands of the Presidential Commission, then at the hands of William Manchester, should have been similar, if not necessarily identical. But it wasn't, as will be made clear. Why?

Rumsfeld flees France fearing arrest Sat, 10/27/2007 - 08:45 Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of "ordering and authorizing" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military's detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest. US embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris organized by the Foreign Policy magazine after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint against the man who spearheaded President George W. Bush's "war on terror" for six years. Under international law, authorities in France are obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the alleged torturer is on French soil. According to activists in France, who greeted Rumsfeld shouting "murderer" and "war criminal" at the breakfast meeting venue, US embassy officials remained tight-lipped about the former defense secretary's whereabouts citing "security reasons". Anti-torture protesters in France believe that the defense secretary fled over the open border to Germany, where a war crimes case against Rumsfeld was dismissed by a federal court. But activist point out that under the Schengen agreement that ended border checkpoints across a large part of the European Union, French law enforcement agents are allowed to cross the border into Germany in pursuit of a fleeing fugitive. "Rumsfeld must be feeling how Saddam Hussein felt when US forces were hunting him down," activist Tanguy Richard said. "He may never end up being hanged like his old friend, but he must learn that in the civilized world, war crime doesn't pay." International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights (LDH) filed the complaint on Thursday after learning that Rumsfeld was scheduled to visit Paris. http://wor.ldne.ws/node/8596 De Gaulle: “A wind blew through France…”

If you're placing both McCarthy's calls for Hoover's replacement/dismissal, and Hoover's reciprocal interest in McCarthy, within the context of the collapse of the relationship between CIA and the FBI in the late 1960s, sure. The choice: The error is intentional and represents an attempt, by conflating the identities of two famous right-wingers with the same surname, to make a serious point with humour. Your interpretation, a mistake, is correct - though proceeding to claim, as you seem to be, that this invalidates Blum’s point about McCarthy’s real, as opposed to ostensible, motivations, smacks a little of desperation; and is perhaps unwise. Would the discovery of a similar error in the work of, say, Bill Kelly, invalidate everything else he wrote on the relevant topic? Of course not. I look forward to reading them. Paul

Bill, I'm not quite sure what your point is. Please clarify. Paul